Health Imaging & IT - October 2007 - (Page 59) setting up ct in the imaging center when approaching any patient, especially women, but now we’re not talking about major radiation exposure to the chest.” staying on the cutting edge The ability to expand the range of services available to patients and to stand out from the competition is a big draw of CT. “Our MO is to try to stay pretty much cutting edge—at or just below,” says William Muhr, MD, a radiologist at South Jersey Radiology Associates, a group with nine locations in southern New Jersey. To maintain that goal, the practice installed a 64-slice CT scanner from Siemens Medical Solutions last September. “We were interested particularly in coronary CT angiography.” “Cardiac imaging is the new line of work,” Muhr says. “There has been an overall increase of CT utilization nationwide for a lot of reasons.” For one, the image quality is phenomenal. Also, CT has replaced some other techniques. CT is almost the first line of treatment for general abdominal pain today. There also is work being done on tumor perfusion on CT and assessing tumor response to chemotherapy at a very early stage. These and other applications will continue to drive the increasing use of CT. To be efficient on high-end scanners, “we need to be able to run a fairly decent schedule but we don’t have a captive audience of inpatients to fill gaps,” Muhr says. So, it’s important to have a very efficient schedule and adhere to it. Muhr says clinicians have some dependency on CT scanners right now. “They are very efficient and absorb a fair amount of growth.” he says, which includes orthopedists and neurologists. If they have the volume to justify the purchase, the investment probably makes sense for those groups, he says. The investment makes sense for many practices but Winkler cautions against the pressure to purchase high slice-count multidetector scanners if a facility doesn’t truly need those scanning capabilities. “The new family of scanners is based upon the same detector design,” so providers can hold on to the same system for a longer period of time because they have not become obsolete. “That’s important in this era of [reimbursement cuts due to] the Deficit Reduction Act.” Plus, clinicians can keep using 4-slice scanners for their bread-and-butter work indefinitely because the systems are so reliable and robust. the competition crunch The biggest difference between outpatient imaging centers and hospitals is competition, says Jon Ekstrom, MD, president of Radiology Associates in Eugene, Ore., which covers Oregon Imaging Centers. “You need to win the confidence of referring physicians and the patients themselves” to grow your business. That includes easy scheduling for the referring office staff, as well as a pleasant environment in a convenient location for the patients. “You should have updated equipment that you can push to differentiate yourself.” There are more issues for outpatient imaging centers to consider in the competitive environment, such as accredited equipment, certified technologists and radiologists who can distinguish themselves as experts. As new, more complicated studies come along, Ekstrom says that specialty and subspecialty physicians can champion those studies and take on the task of educating the community about the studies. Meanwhile, Ekstrom sees a trend of more and more nonradiology groups bringing imaging in-house. “The specialties that tend to generate a lot of imaging studies are leading the charge,” HealthImaging.com Health Imaging & IT | O C T O B E R 2 0 07 59 http://www.mergehealthcare.com http://www.mergehealthcare.com http://HealthImaging.com
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